1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a controller device such as a set-top box and a digital television receiving set, which can be connected to a hard disk recorder for IEEE 1394 (so-called AVHDD) via an IEEE 1394 serial bus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, hard disk recorders to be connected to a controller device such as a set-top box and a digital television receiving set by using an IEEE 1394 serial bus cable (so-called AVHDD) have been increasingly used. When using this kind of hard disk recorders, the user generally adopts a method of accumulating program files until remaining storage capacity of a hard disk in the hard disk recorder has been run out and then selecting and deleting program files to be deleted one by one from the side of the controller device, or selecting program files to be deleted one by one from the side of the controller device and deleting the selected program files all together.
According to the above-mentioned deleting method, there occurs no problem when the number of the program files to be deleted is small. However, when the number of the program files to be deleted exceeds 100, it may take one hour or more only to select and delete the unnecessary program files. In many cases, when remaining storage capacity of the hard disk in the hard disk recorder has been run out, almost all of recorded program files are unnecessary for the user.
Furthermore, even when the user intends to delete all program files in the hard disk recorder by using a format command, since the format command issued from the controller device to the hard disk recorder is effective only between devices made by the same manufacturer, all program files in the hard disk recorder cannot be deleted all together by using a format command in the case where a manufacturer of the controller device is different from that of the hard disk recorder.